October 6, 1976: A Presidential debate is held. It includes a mistake that may have cost one of the candidates the election.
The 4 debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 were considered an overwhelming success. But in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had a big lead over Barry Goldwater, and thus no need to risk anything through a debate. He won in a landslide. In 1968, Richard Nixon had a big lead over Hubert Humphrey, and also saw no reason to risk it, even though Humphrey nearly caught him, and Nixon's win was a squeaker. In 1972, Nixon had a big lead over George McGovern, and didn't risk it, and won in a landslide.
But in 1976, President Gerald Ford was running as a Republican Party nominee who had been elected neither President nor Vice President. Running for a term in his own right, he badly trailed the Democratic Party nominee, former Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, due to the lingering feeling over the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, Ford's pardon of Nixon, the economic recession that Nixon left Ford and Ford was still struggling to end, and a general feeling of listlessness in the country. Ford needed something, and so he challenged Carter to a series of debates. Carter, wanting to prove himself against the incumbent, accepted.
On September 23, the 1st of 3 debates was held. Since this was the year of America's Bicentennial, celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, many major events had been held in Philadelphia that year. So it made sense to hold one of the debates there. It was held at what was, and remains, America's oldest continuously operating entertainment venue, the Walnut Street Theatre.
This debate, focusing on domestic policy, is remembered not for what was said, but for what couldn't be said. An hour and 21 minutes in, almost to the point where the closing arguments would have to be given, Carter was answering a question, and the sound cut out. And Ford and Carter just stood at their podiums, not saying a word, for 27 minutes, until the sound was fixed, and they were able to complete the debate.
Most observers thought the debate was inconclusive. But, in a way, that helped both men: Ford needed a good result to help his comeback, and Carter needed to appear "Presidential" alongside the incumbent.
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The 2nd Presidential debate was held on October 6, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, focusing on foreign policy. Max Frankel, foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, asked Ford about the Helsinki Accords, negotiated the previous year. Conservatives alleged that the Accords conceded too much to the Soviet Union.
Ford pointed out that Pope Paul VI had endorsed the Accords, the implication being that the head of the Roman Catholic Church had anti-Communist credentials that could not be questioned. Ford suggested that the rest of the leaders of the NATO countries had endorsed the Accords. He made it sound like opposing the Accords was tantamount to disagreeing with all of these men who, presumably, knew what they were doing.
Had Ford stopped there, it would have been a great answer. Long accused of being dumb -- and, as a graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale University School of Law, he most certainly was not -- he had given a very thoughtful answer, which should have shored up his support among conservatives in general, Catholics, and people of Eastern European descent.
He did not stop there. He followed this with these words, making a downward slash with his hand to make his point: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration."
This statement was meant to suggest that it hadn't happened yet, and that he wouldn't let it happen. But most people knew that it had already happened, long before he took office, even before he first took office in Congress in 1948.
Everybody watching was shocked. The whole point of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets' organizational response to NATO, was to dominate Eastern Europe. As Winston Churchill put it in his 1946 speech that put a phrase into the world's lexicon, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent." With this statement, Ford seemed to be suggesting that the Warsaw Pact did not involve Soviet-influenced military enforcement of Communist law, and sometimes direct Soviet military enforcement.
Frankel threw Ford a potential lifeline. "Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there?"
Ford answered: "I don't believe that the Yugoslavs consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union."
He was right about the Yugoslavs, whose dictator Josip Broz Tito had famously resisted Joseph Stalin, and was still in power (he died in 1980), so the Soviets considered interference to be not worth the effort. He was right about the Romanians, whom the Soviets saw as being properly allied, so they new that interference wasn't necessary. But the Poles? That was too far.
Ford had badly blundered, and, given the chance to redeem himself, he had deepened the hole he had dug for himself. It made him look like he had no idea of what was going on. It infuriated key voters in places filled with Europeans whose families had fled Soviet brutality.
With only a few seconds' worth of notice, Carter came up with the perfect response: "I'd like to see Mr. Ford convince Polish-Americans, and Czech-Americans, and Hungarian-Americans that those countries don't live under the supervision and control of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain."
Carter had figured out the right countries to mention, in addition to Poland: It had been only 8 years since the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and 20 years since they had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. This would have been like a candidate from 2008 onward saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an accident.
Ford's chief pollster, Bob Teeter, later said, "The controversy used up valuable campaign days when there were all too few left, when a steady climb had to be sustained." In other words, the Republicans had to spend time dealing with this gaffe when they would rather have spent time on issues that favored them and put the Democrats on the defensive.
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On October 15, for the 1st time, the major-party nominees for Vice President had a televised debate. It was held at the Alley Theatre in Houston. The Democratic nominee, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, was calm. The Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, was less so, and may have been another factor that cost Ford the election.
Mondale thought it appropriate to mention the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon from office. It was appropriate not only because Ford had pardoned Nixon, but because, on June 17, 1972, the night that the burglars broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, Senator Dole was doing double duty as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Let the record show that Dole was not then, nor has since, been seriously accused of any involvement in the various crimes that have fallen under the umbrella term "Watergate."
Dole, himself a wounded veteran of World War II, responded by saying, "It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it's not a very good issue, any more than the war in Vietnam would be, or World War II, or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."
Dole was usually smart enough to be a very savvy political operator, gathering or "whipping" votes to pass, or block, legislation as needed. But doing that, behind the scenes, is one thing: Being the spokesperson for your own thoughts and ideas is another.
This answer was completely stupid, and not just because his math was way off. Detroit's population had peaked in 1950, at 1.8 million, and was still about 1.5 million in the 1970 Census. By 1976, though, "white flight" had reduced it to about 1.3 million. It dropped under 1 million in 1994, and it kept declining, all the way to 631,000 by 2022. No U.S. city has had so sharp a decline. (UPDATE: In 2024, the city was believed to have gained about 2,000 residents, its first gain in any calendar year since 1957.)
In World War I, about 117,000 U.S. military personnel died; in World War II, about 405,000; in the Korean War, about 37,000; and in the Vietnam War, about 59,000; for an estimated total of 626,000. Dole had inflated the figure by 2 1/2 times.
Regarding which Party had "started" or was behind the wars: The Vietnam War started under Dole's idol, fellow Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower; and the others, once Democratic Presidents got America involved, Republicans in Congress wholeheartedly supported the war efforts. Indeed, with World War I, Republicans wanted it more than Democrats; and in World War II, Republicans didn't want to get involved at first, because, being greedy, pro-private property, and thus anti-Communist, they supported the fascist Axis against the Soviet Union.
Mondale and Dole would each later receive his Party's nomination for President -- and lose badly. In neither case was it because he did badly in that election's debates. But, looking back, Dole admitted that his remark had hurt the Ford campaign.
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On October 22, Ford and Carter had their 3rd and final debate, at Phi Beta Kappa Hall on the campus of the College of William and Mary, in the colonial, and thus Bicentennial-connected, city of Williamsburg, Virginia. This debate was notable partly because it didn't have a gaffe, by either candidate; but also because Carter was asked about an earlier gaffe, an interview he had given to journalist Robert Scheer for Playboy magazine.
Scheer asked Carter, a Southern Baptist and a Sunday school teacher at his church in Plains, Georgia, "Do you feel you've reassured people with this interview, people who are uneasy about your religious beliefs, who wonder if you're going to make a rigid, unbending President?"
Carter cited Matthew 5:28:
I'm not speaking for other people, but it gives me a sense of peace and equanimity and assurance. I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery."
I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do, and I have done it, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust, but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.
Scheer called it a "sensible statement," reflecting Carter's Baptist tradition: "He was saying, look, I'm not going to be some fanatic... I'm not this perfect guy." But the media and the era's comedians began to treat Carter as a leering sex fiend -- when the whole point was that he wasn't: Yes, he had these feelings; but, no, he didn't act on them.
For the record, no one was accusing Ford of acting on such feelings. There was a Special Prosecutor appointed to look at an issue with Ford's taxes. With retroactive irony, that Prosecutor, Charles Ruff, later served as one of President Bill Clinton's lawyers during the 1998-99 Monica Lewinsky scandal. At one point, trying to tie Ford to Watergate, which he had not been involved in, but reminding people that Nixon's taxes had also been investigated, Carter said in his speeches, "I don't know what the facts are about Mr. Ford and his income tax. He does." Ruff closed his investigation a few days before the election, and said he had found no wrongdoing on Ford's part.
In that 3rd debate, Carter admitted that he'd made a mistake in granting the Playboy interview in the first place. The admission did what the interview was supposed to do: It humanized him. But the interview had halted the surge he got after the gaffes of Ford and Dole. Polls began to show the race had become a virtual tie.
On November 2, Carter won in a very close vote. Had either Ford or Dole not blown it in their debates, Ford could well have won.
Of course, given everything that happened from 1977 to 1980, maybe Ford was better off having lost, anyway. What I called "a general feeling of listlessness in the country" that had beset Ford's entire Presidency also beset Carter's. In a 1979 speech, he called it "a crisis of confidence." The next day, his speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg called it "a malaise," and that became a label that Carter could never shake, just as Ford could never shake his debate gaffe.
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October 6, 1976 was a Wednesday. All-Star baseball pitcher Freddy Garcia was born.
Baseball was between the end of its regular season and the start of its Playoffs. Football was in midweek. And it was too early for the basketball and hockey seasons to start. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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